fix(agent): make mid-turn /steer trusted, not read as injection

A steer rides inside a tool result (the only role-alternation-safe slot
mid-turn), so a bare "User guidance:" line reads as untrusted tool content —
well-behaved models refuse it as suspected prompt injection (observed live:
"I only follow instructions from you directly, not ones injected through
command results").

- Wrap steers in a bounded, self-describing [OUT-OF-BAND USER MESSAGE] marker
  (prompt_builder.format_steer_marker), shared by both drain sites.
- Add STEER_CHANNEL_NOTE to the core system prompt so the model expects this
  exact marker and trusts it as a genuine user message — while still ignoring
  lookalikes buried in tool/web/file output. Static text → byte-stable prompt,
  no prompt-cache regression; gated on the agent having tools.
- Desktop: steer ack is now an inline transcript note ( steered · …) instead
  of a toast.

Marker is intentionally static (not a per-session nonce) to honor the
byte-stable system-prompt caching policy; nonce hardening noted as follow-up.
This commit is contained in:
Brooklyn Nicholson
2026-06-05 20:59:36 -05:00
parent 40aef6af91
commit 0f45509daf
6 changed files with 75 additions and 14 deletions
+2 -1
View File
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ from pathlib import Path
from typing import Any, Dict, List, Optional
from hermes_cli.timeouts import get_provider_request_timeout
from agent.prompt_builder import format_steer_marker
from agent.tool_dispatch_helpers import _trajectory_normalize_msg, make_tool_result_message
from agent.trajectory import convert_scratchpad_to_think
from agent.credential_pool import STATUS_EXHAUSTED
@@ -2324,7 +2325,7 @@ def apply_pending_steer_to_tool_results(agent, messages: list, num_tool_msgs: in
existing = getattr(agent, "_pending_steer", None)
agent._pending_steer = (existing + "\n" + steer_text) if existing else steer_text
return
marker = f"\n\nUser guidance: {steer_text}"
marker = format_steer_marker(steer_text)
existing_content = messages[target_idx].get("content", "")
if not isinstance(existing_content, str):
# Anthropic multimodal content blocks — preserve them and append